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International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 )
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
Building an Application Server for Home Network based on Android Platform
Dr.-Ing. Chao-Huang Wei
Department of Electrical Engineering
Southern Taiwan University
No. 1, Nan-Tai St., Yung-Kang/Tainan, Taiwan 710
Yi-Hsien Liao
Department of Electrical Engineering
Southern Taiwan University
No. 1, Nan-Tai St., Yung-Kang/Tainan, Taiwan 710
Abstract:
Android platform is developed by Google Inc. since 2007, this open and free software stack includes an
operating system, middleware and also key applications for use on mobile devices originally, now Android is
an Open Handset Alliance Project. Application servers refer to the service, hardware, and software used to host
a website. The software (middleware) perform a variety of functions online that connect information from a
database to a web application, in a distributed network it functions on a multitier software architecture platform
that serves an Application Protocol Interface (API). An application server based on an Android platform is
developed in this paper that provides a web control system for home network via home powerline. The main
benefits of this system are license free, highly mobility, and free of wire connection between household
appliances.
Keywords - Android Platform; Application Server; Powerline Communication; Home Network
I. Introduction
Today, under the demand of energy saving and carbon emission reduction, variety of electrical
equipments in addition to commitment to their own energy-saving design, must work together also with other
surrounding devices and change their operation mode in response to environmental conditions, therefore, a
variety of sensors and actuators need to link into a network and then be controlled by a specific program, thus
these equipments have "intelligent" to communicate and interaction with people and other equipments [1].
In response to this emerging technology trends, this research project will employ a new powerline
control chip as the core component, which enables various electrical devices been integrated into the intelligent
home network. Three main tasks will be developed in this project: construction of home electrical appliances
nodes; construction of a home powerline application server and migration Android operating system for quick
implementation and ease of use and maintains of this web server.
To achieve the above purpose, this project will focus on the networking for home environment; there
are many furniture and electrical equipments distributed in many spaces usually. To connect them the wired
networking cabling could damage the existing interior decoration, and also limits the flexibility of the device
placement location; the wireless networking may overcome the shortcomings of the wired networking, but
susceptible to electromagnetic interference and unstable signal strength. On the other hand, any home electrical
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 43
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN
(ISSN No : 2091-1610
2091
)
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
device requires a power supply for operation; therefore use the power cord to network will be the best choice. It
use this power line as the means of data communication via the AC cord to link devices, although it still a wired
link, but the device can be replaced at any location easily, and do not need to change any home decorating or
moving furniture, and are not subject to the restrictions of location. Power Line Communication (PLC)
technology has been developed for years, reliability and stability
stability are also been recognized[2] [3], Table 1 is a
list of several important powerline networking technology:
Table 1. Main characteristics of several powerline networking technologies
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the characteristics and functions of a core
component for powerline communication. In section III, the design implementation is presented. The
experiment and results are presented in section IV. Section V presents some conclusion and discussion for the
future work.
II. Characteristics and Functions of Powerline Communication Modem
From the above descriptions the powerline network might be the most recent and more advanced for
home network. To easy implement this technology a PLC modem (IT700) from Yitran was
wa selected [4], the
main reasons are: 1. IT700 is a fully integrated PLC microcontroller for command and control applications on a
single chip, which incorporates an extremely reliable PHY, line driver, 8051 MCU core with 256 KB flash
ROM for protocol stack
ack and firmware, 16KB RAM, and 24 GPIOs (Fig. 1).
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 44
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN
(ISSN No : 2091-1610
2091
)
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
2. IT700 follows the HomePlug Command and Control standard and uses PLC ready transceiver technology
[5], which is high immunity to signal fading, phase/ frequency distortion, various noise characteristics,
characterist
and
impedance modulation. 3. Yitran offers complete reference design and Plug In Module (PIM) with integrated
Analogue Frond End (AFE), line coupler and power supply interfaces for quick application prototyping and
development (Fig. 2).
Figure 2. IT700’s
T700’s Plug In Module [4]
4. The IT700 incorporates reliable Physical Layer (PHY), high-performance
high performance Data Link Layer (DLL) and
Network (Y-Net)
Net) protocol [6]. The Network Layer (NL) is implemented using an advanced and compact
adaptive routing and automatic addressing
ddressing mechanism, enabling optimal and simple powerline communication
(Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Y-Net
Net protocol stack firmware and OSI layers [6]
From the foregoing review and development prospects, the PLC engages a considerable role of the
home appliance network. For this research project, the Israel Yitran advanced PLC modem chip IT700 will be
used as an interface to bridge digital data to and from powerline network, while the embedded ARM platform
as an application server to management the home network and the Internet.
III. System Implementation
Since the IT700 PIM supports up to network layer only, all other above layers must be executed by
other processor, therefore in the PLC control network two types of controller were implemented in this work,
one is an embedded application server with powerful microprocessor used also for local operation, and the other
is device controller with simple and low cost microprocessor used for control or monitoring home appliances.
The implement of the system is divided into three parts: construction of household device nodes,
construction of application server, and migration of an embedded operating system. The detail development
steps are described below:
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 45
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 )
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
A. Construction of household device nodes
To provide “intelligent” to household appliances and to enable them link to a network, these devices
must have the ability to run with a program economically, we can not make a simple power outlet or electrical
switch so expensive as a cell phone or a computer; therefore these household appliances must be constructed on
very low cost single-chip. Figure 4 shows a block diagram of a home PLC appliance node; its host controller
may use the general IO ports to reading various sensor data or switch power outlet on and off to control
electrical devices. On the other hand via serial port enables digital data receiving and transferring to powerline
control chip, which follows the HomePlug Command and Control standard and solves all complicate
communication issues. Therefore the construction of PLC household appliance can make quite easy and
reliable.
Figure 4. Home PLC appliance node
B. Construction of application server
The application server management household appliance linking in the home network via powerlines
on one hand, and on the other hand links itself to Internet through Ethernet, and provides man-machine
graphical user control interface.
The hardware platform was built on a Samsung high-performance 32-bit single-chip S3C6410 [7], which can
operate in 667 MHz frequency, has internal 16KB data / 16KB instruction cache, and rich peripheral component
interface control circuits (Fig. 5). S3C6410 processor uses 64-bit internal bus architecture, including many
hardware accelerators, such as: dynamic video processing, display control and scaling, hardware codec support a
variety of formats: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 and VC-1. Its hardware acceleration support real-time video
conferencing and analog TV output supports NTSC and PAL modes. Provides a 24bit LCD, TVout, Camera
Input, 4-channel Serial, SD card, SPI, 100M Ethernet network, USB 2.0-OTG, USB Host, audio output/input,
8x8 keys, I2C interface. It can be applied on high performance and processing power requirements of embedded
systems applications.
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 46
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN
(ISSN No : 2091-1610
2091
)
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
Figure 5. Function blocks of
o single-chip microprocessor S3C6410 [7]
The S3C6410 board is a compact full-featured
full featured embedded Single Board Computer (SBC) based upon
Samsung
ARM11 S3C6410 CPU [8], designed specifically for mobile Internet device, netbook, and
handheld/3G mobile implementations
tations initially (Fig. 6). This board allows easy embedded application
development through PCcompatible tools and methods, while ensuring in-field
in field reliability and ruggedness for
end-user
user systems. On board storages include 128MB DDR SDRAM, 256MB NAND Flash,
Flash 2MB NOR Flash.
Features of this board make it particularly suitable also for automotive and industrial control applications as well
as medical systems. In addition, it supports many operating systems, e.g. Windows Embedded CE 6.0, Linux2.6,
Android and Ubuntu OS.
Figure 6. ARM 11 development board [8]
fig : 7 Home PLC Application Server
C. Migration of Android operating system
The home application server must use an efficient, real-time
real time operating system to simplify the
development of multiple functions and shorten also the development cycle. An operating system can provide
five major functions: provides users with simple operating environment, monitor and management the execution
of processes, deployment of programs to use diversity of hardware resources, file management and memory
management. Generally speaking, due to resource constraints of embedded systems, they require a small
footprint, high efficiency in the implementation and can be stored in a customized
customized ROM operating system.
Among numerous embedded operating systems, this project selects a standardized, open source, license-free,
license
and easy to maintain Android operating system for the hardware platform, the main reason will be described as
follows:
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 47
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 )
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
The Android OS was developed by Google Inc. initially, now managed by the Open Handset Alliance
(OHA). The beta version was released on Nov. 5, 2007 [9] [10], while the software developer's kit (SDK) was
released on Nov. 12, 2007 [11]. Current version v4.0.4 was released in Mar. 2012 [12]. Due to the essence of
platform independence and is license open and free, the Android is highly accepted in the cell phone market
nowadays, Android delivers a complete set of software for mobile devices: operating system, middleware and
key mobile applications that enables open, fast & easy application development. The developers can write
managed code in Java language via Android Java libraries, therefore it can also be deployment in many other
domains rapidly. Although the Android target market expanding only from mobile devices to netbooks and
STBs currently, but also for other applications in the near future such as car computers (automotive), medical
instruments, industrial equipment/control, office automation, multimedia player, video surveillance, storage and
networking appliance, home automation, instrumentation, etc. Android has many interesting points for
embedded system developers, it brings Internet-style innovation and openness to mobile/embedded equipments;
provides a rich development environment, e.g. device emulator on PC, tools for debugging, and plug-in for the
Eclipse IDE; its application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components, e.g. integrated browser,
optimized graphics, SQLite for structured data storage, media support for common audio, video, and image
formats, and communication support. Android can be regarded as a Linux kernel-based software platform and
operating system, it uses software stack architecture [13], and the stack is divided into three layers: a bottom
core layer (Kernel), system libraries and virtual machine layer, and the Java application code layer (Fig. 8).
Figure 1.
Android software stack [13]
Following steps are the porting processes of an Android operating system:
(1) Install the Linux environment (Ubuntu) on PC
(2) Install the compiler tool (Eclipse3.7) on PC
(3) Download the Linux kernel (2.6.28) to PC
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 48
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN
(ISSN No : 2091-1610
2091
)
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
(4) Install the Android SDK on PC
(5) Obtain the root file system (rootfs_android.cramfs)
(6) Modify the Linux kernel source codes
(7) Configure the Linux kernel
(8) Modify the root file system
(9) Compile the Linux kernel
(10) Download the kernel image to hardware platform (zImage_android_43)
The Linux kernel provides core system services include: security, memory management, the network
stack, process management, drive model, other conventional driver model contains interface to the core, keys,
camera, memory, audio, Bluetooth, USB, WiFi, binder, power management and so on.
IV. Experiment Results
This section will describe experiment results of the above realizations of home network. The test
system consists of a PLC application server, a first PLC web controller with 4 AC power outlets, a second PLC
web controller with 9 digital I/O channels, and a remote PC or smart phone (Fig. 9). Local user can touch the
LCD screen on the application server and select the button to control or query the power supply of each outlet
and check the digital I/O channels (Fig. 10). Remote user can also control the power supply of household
appliances,
ances, such as a computer, a server, a hot water boiler, and an entrance guard or security/surveillance
system directly or use a time schedule table which was stored in the application server (Fig. 11).
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 49
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN
(ISSN No : 2091-1610
2091
)
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
Figure 13a is a user’s interface on the application server, the user can check or uncheck the power outlet to be
controlled or the digital I/O port to be monitored. After the “apply” button is touched, the server will send the
required commands to those devices or I/O ports via the home power-line,
power
and receive
eive response data.
Control menu on home PLC application server
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
Example of power outlet control
Through the PLC application server the data of digital I/O port can be retrieved also from remote user via
Internet browser. After remote user connects this server via Internet, a web page will displayed on the user’s
computer (Fig. 12), and then the user’s operation is similar to the local operation on the server’s screen.
Figure 12. PLC home appliances control via Internet browser
V. Conclusions and Futuree Works
This project develops an economic application server based on powerline communication technology
that can monitor and control electrical appliances at home via the server. Authorized user can control the
selected household appliance or monitoring sensor’s
sensor’s data locally or from the Internet easily. The user’s interface
This Paper is presented on : International Conference on Information Integration and Computing Applications –
August 14-15, 2012 – Singapore ……………………………………… Page … 50
International Journal of Information Technology & Computer Science ( IJITCS ) (ISSN No : 2091-1610 )
Volume 5 : Issue on September / October , 2012
is quite convenient, via Internet web browser from any platform to access this system. Data security also
provided to protect the system from unauthorized access.
Although this system can process some simple tasks at this moment only, but it can be extended further
for some additional functions, such as video monitoring and burglar alarm for enhance home security or
automatic timer control for saving energy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by the National Science Council (NSC) Taiwan under Grant NSC 100-2221- E218-038-.
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